


One Heir and One Spare

by birdyhands



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abusive Parents, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Conversations, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Not A Fix-It, One Shot, Orion Black's A+ Parenting, Rated T for Abuse, Rated T for language, Regulus Black Deserves Better, Regulus Black Feels, Regulus Black-centric, Walburga Black's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28867542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdyhands/pseuds/birdyhands
Summary: Sirius runs away from home without so much as a backward glance and Regulus is left to deal with the consequences of a maddening mother and his parents' paranoia that he'll follow Sirius if given the opportunity. Regulus confronts Sirius about the consequences of his running away when he sees him the next year at Hogwarts.!!Warnings for discussion of, references to, and short depictions of child abuse, as well as Regulus being lowkey victim blamey toward Sirius. These are main themes in this fic please do not read if it is going to be harmful to your mental health!!This is not a fix it. Literally, nothing in this fic makes anything better than it is in canon, if anything it makes it worse.
Relationships: Regulus Black & Sirius Black
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	One Heir and One Spare

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this when I should have been paying attention in my Philosophy Senior Seminar class V(^_^)V enjoy.

It’s raining, pouring really, the night that Sirius leaves for good. Because of course, the heavens themselves cater to the stubborn will of Sirius Black. Or maybe Sirius was just holding out for a good storm like this one to make his dramatic exit. Either way, Regulus is quite sure that his brother made one hell of a sight showing up on the Potter’s doorstep drenched, bloody, and with that wild-desperate look in his eyes. 

Regulus does not have the luxury of theatrics or expressing emotion at all that night. His face is a stoic mask even as panic rises up internally at the sight of his brother flinging open the door, turning back to shout one last obscenity at their mother, and then disappearing without so much as acknowledging Regulus watching from the base of the stairs with eyes just a little too wide to suit the nonchalant mask that he constructs. He holds onto that mask as best he can even though his chest hurts from the frantic pace of his heart and his teeth are clenched so tightly that the joints of his jaw creak and pop. 

It’s not like he’s ignorant of the distance that’s been creeping farther between them ever since Sirius first left for Hogwarts, but he never expected that his brother would just leave him like this. He can’t really blame him; Sirius has had it worse than him in most ways here at home. Being the oldest meant he had become the scapegoat before Regulus was even born and he kept that status all the way until being sorted into Gryffindor made everything a million times worse. His sudden departure still shocks Regulus more than it realistically should. 

He watches in mild fascination and less-mild horror as Sirius turns dramatically away from the door, droplets of blood flying from the several injuries and cuts that he’s sporting after mother’s latest screaming and hexing match with him, and Regulus knows that this isn’t like any of the other times Siri has run off only to reappear the next day, tired and haggard, but otherwise alright. His brother isn’t coming back this time and it’s probably exactly what’s best for him. And probably also what’s worst for Regulus. He’s trying not to feel too hurt by it. 

Regulus stands at the base of the stairs until Mother stops screaming and the silence where Sirius would normally reply stretches horribly through the tense air. Regulus wants nothing more than to disappear in that moment, but even his quiet footsteps are sure to be loud enough to refocus Mother’s attention on him and Regulus isn’t quite sure what that attention will mean now that Sirius isn’t there. Whatever it means, it can’t be good. Mother never needed Sirius’s antagonizing in order to justify her cruelty and temper, likely she’ll just turn them fully on her younger son now. 

It apparently doesn’t matter that Regulus stands statue-still and hardly breathes for the next couple of agonizingly silent minutes, Mother does eventually remember his presence and her dark eyes search him out in the shadows of the banister until they find his slightly fearful expression. There’s a slightly mad glint in her glare that Regulus doesn’t like the look of at all and he wills himself to stay calm as Mother swoops at him and resumes her screeching. 

She alternates between calling him by his own name and Sirius’s, but Regulus considers himself lucky when she hits him once, across the cheek hard enough that he finds himself on the floor with blood welling in his mouth, and Mother doesn’t haul him back up. She surveys her work for a moment, seemingly satisfied for the moment before she whirls about and shouts for Kreacher to clean up the blood, Sirius’s blood, that’s splattered abstractly across the wood of the floor and the otherwise pristine rugs. She calmly informs Regulus that he won’t be allowed supper tonight and Regulus isn’t even sure if she’s intended the message for him or his absent brother. Either way, he’s slightly grateful to not have to face the dining room and what would certainly have been a horribly tense meal. He’s not hungry anyway and the thought of eating makes him nauseous. More nauseous than he already is. 

Regulus goes to bed with a sense of foreboding lodged somewhere just behind his navel and too many thoughts swirling in his mind for any sort of restful sleep. 

***

It’s almost a full week into the next school year when Regulus finally sees his brother again. It’s startling when he sees him and realizes for the first time just how much being away from home benefits his brother. Normally his brother’s cheeks fill back in and his bruises fade at a similar pace as the ones that Regulus sees in the mirror do, glammours cautiously discarded in similar timing. To see the disparity in their conditions is startling. 

Sirius must see the emphasis as well, the slightly blurred quality to Regulus’s skin, the thinness that he can’t hide with simple charms, the rings of blue under his eyes that the glammours don’t hide because they’re the result of exhaustion, not injury. Sirius must see all of this because he stops talking mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open stupidly for several seconds before he slams it shut and decidedly looks away from Regulus. He’s not about to get off that easily though. Regulus hardly cares that Bella, lounging against a pillar a little further down the hall, will undoubtedly report the interaction back to his mother, he just needs to talk to Siri, to see that he’s still _there_. He doesn’t let his steps falter as he walks purposefully to his brother, grabs him by the arm, and drags him away from the Lupin boy who frowns uncertainly but does nothing to prevent the interruption. 

“I’ll catch up with you in charms, just go ahead without me!” Sirius calls out before allowing Regulus to drag him into an abandoned classroom and cast a silencing charm on the door. He’s not going to make things _that_ easy for Bella. Now that he’s finally got Sirius here, felt the physical weight of his arm, assured himself that his brother is alright, much more alright than he himself is faring in fact, Regulus isn’t entirely sure what to say. 

Sirius looks good. He looks healthy and happy in a way that he never has the chance to be at home and Regulus is glad that he’s doing well, really he is, but it feels like the crack, the widening ditch, the chasm between them is ever wider than before. Regulus feels like a new person. Harsh and pointed at angles where he used to be soft. Sirius is all smiles and concern and Regulus feels like he’s forgotten what it’s like to have someone care about him like that. It feels foreign that Sirius is looking at him with pity, worry, something more distant than their old empathetic camaraderie. 

Sirius breaks the silence, as per their usual dynamic, “how have you been Reggie?”

Regulus lets out an answering snort of cynical laughter and Sirius winces at the harshness of it. 

“Have things… calmed down a little at home? Mother treating you okay?”

And what the hell kind of question is that? Sirius should know the answer to that by now. There is no ‘okay’ in that house. Nothing that can be construed as normalcy. Mother’s been a nightmare, and honestly? When isn’t she?

“Things haven’t changed one bit, Sirius,” he bites out. 

“But… with me gone… things have got to be a little calmed down by now, right?”

And by all accounts, they should be, but the cursed House of Black is never as it ought to be and his brother should know that. He’s always been the more naive of the two of them when it came to the family at least. Sirius was never able to see the bigger picture, or alternatively the minuscule twisting vines that made up the House of Black. He was only ever able to see their branch of it, and never in the sort of detail that Regulus understood. 

“Mother is still half-convinced you’ve come back there,” Regulus answers conversationally, “she calls me your name half the time when she’s yelling. You still do the stupidest shit sometimes. Why, do you remember just a week after you first stormed out when your marks showed up and mother was so furious over your muggle studies credit that she…?”

As much as Regulus wants to throw it at Sirius with as much venom as his voicebox is capable of, the thought of that night makes him feel ill, and his voice trail off. He blinks a few rapid times.

Even as he fails to inform his brother of exactly _what_ mother had done, he sees Sirius’s eyes become wide and horrified. He may be naive when it comes to the motivations and the intricacies of their family, but Sirius at least understands the consequences and punishments aspect of things. There’s an undercurrent of guilt in forcing this on Sirius, but he pushes that aside. His brother needs to know the truth of what he damned Regulus to. 

“She… what did she do, Reggie?” 

“She used Cr-- she finally-- she just snapped and…”

Sirius’s voice is flat, the way it only gets when his brother is truly scared and covering it poorly, “she used an unforgivable then.”

Regulus wants to laugh at the undercurrent of disbelief, “it was always leading that direction,” Regulus points out, “you just managed to get out before she made it there.”

Sirius looks vaguely ill, but Regulus is just getting warmed up. He’s got other frustrations to vent and hurl at his brother and he plans to do so until Sirius’s face crumples and he knots his hands in his ridiculously long hair and finds himself at a loss for words. 

“You need to get out of there, Reggie,” Sirius interjects. 

Regulus laughs out loud, more to be mean than because anything is even remotely funny at the moment. 

“Right,” he says, “as if that’s an option.” 

Before Sirius can start, Regulus sets to explaining the myriad of reasons why he can’t. 

“Maybe,” he starts, slow and dangerous, “maybe I could’ve at some point, but there was only ever one of us getting out of there and you didn’t even look back when you took that ticket.”

Sirius’s face remains stubborn, convinced that Regulus could have left and is choosing not to. He’s always been so readable. Regulus huffs in exasperation. He’s exhausted and this would be so much easier if his brother wasn’t such an idiot. 

“The house of Black needs an heir--”

Sirius rolls his eyes. 

“Or at least that’s how Mother and Father see things.”

“They’re wrong!” Sirius barks at him. 

Regulus shrugs helplessly, refusing to rise to Sirius’s infuriating tendency to make everything into an invitation to argue. 

“Yeah, they probably are terribly wrong. But you’ll never convince them of it and as long as they believe that, there are only two options. One heir and one spare. You good as removed yourself from the pool, so now it’s down to me. They were content to let me take your place as inheritor when you became the family disappointment, but what exactly do you think would happen if I had gone off with you?”

Siri says nothing, scuffs his shoes against the floor like he wants to run instead of talk. 

“Because the way I see it,” Regulus continues, “if I had gone to any of my acquaintances, I would’ve been brought home within the same day. And if I’d gone with you, to James’s… Well. Mother would’ve gone straight through the Potters to get both of us back. Then I reckon she would’ve pulled you straight out of school-- kept you home on a leash so tight you’d go mad by your 17th.”

Sirius looks like it’s sinking in, the mess that he had left Regulus in, but Regulus doesn’t care. Understanding isn’t enough, he wants to twist the knife just a little. He’s been on the receiving end of mother and father’s frustrations for the last two months all alone and he feels broken and hurt and pent-up. Lashing out feels like the only thing that will make it better. Anger is the only way he’s holding back tears, so he holds onto the anger like there’s nothing else there to sink into. 

“You probably would’ve been made the heir again and I would’ve been sent back to school to keep us separated. Not before Mother would’ve had to fix me up with strong enough glammour charms to set off the intruder wards here at the castle to cover the damage she’d done, of course.”

Regulus grins terribly at the stricken look of realization mixed with hurt on Sirius’s face. 

“Besides,” Regulus picks at his nails, feigning calm, even though this might actually be the worst part of the whole ordeal so far, “even if I wanted to join you, even if I was willing to risk all that, even if you were too, it’s too late now.” 

Sirius’s own impulsiveness has sealed both their fates. Stupid Gryffindor. 

“You must’ve come back at least to try to get your things?” Regulus questions. 

“I couldn’t get in,” Sirius admits, just as Regulus had suspected. 

“New wards,” Regulus explains briefly, “there are the ones you encountered to keep others out, and then there are the ones Father placed to keep me in.”

“What?”

“The day after you left they took all sorts of new measures to keep me from following. I haven’t been able to put a toe beyond the doorstep without one of them at my side since then.”

Regulus feels his face flushing though he’s not entirely sure why. The loss of autonomy in the last month and a half of the summer had been a horrible adjustment and the restrictions and punishments feel like the sorts of things he’d normally be embarrassed by although he’s done nothing to deserve them this time. 

Sirius swallows thickly looking entirely out of his depth. His hand comes up to grip Regulus’s arm, though it seems he’s not fully conscious of the motion. 

“You must have felt that they burnt you off the tapestry as well?” Regulus asks. 

Sirius nods, cupping his unoccupied hand to his jaw in phantom pain. Regulus is fairly sure it must’ve hurt terribly. His own mouth had tasted like ashes and felt singed and tender for days just from the proximity of their images on the tapestry when Mother had burnt Siri off. 

“They bound me to it. The tapestry. The family.”

“They bound us to it forever ago,” Sirius reminds him, “that’s why…” his hand nurses his jaw once again. 

He’s technically right, but being bound with milk teeth is nothing. You outgrow milk teeth. You learn to live without them by the time you’ve gotten your Hogwarts letter. They’re forgettable and most importantly, they’re easy to disobey and forsake in adolescence and adulthood. 

“They only bound us there with milk teeth before,” Regulus counters aloud, inviting the inevitable follow-up question. 

“What did they bind you with then?”

“Nothing I could so easily discard.”

Regulus watches, calculating, for a moment as Sirius’s eyes slowly gain the wild fear that he’s been waiting for. He lets the silence stretch just enough to be dramatic. Long enough that his brother’s mind must be envisioning every worst possibility. The truth itself is horrible. Regulus is determined to at least find a little bit of satisfaction in revealing it. 

“Blood.” 

Sirius lets out a pitiful strangled noise like a whining dog and the hand that’s been clamped around Regulus’s arm falls away thumping lifelessly back to his brother’s side. 

“Reggie?” Sirius whispers uncertainly.

Regulus shrugs. There’s not really anything more to say. Nothing to be done, nothing to fix this nightmare, just the harsh truth of what’s been done. What Sirius, albeit indirectly, did to him. 

He brushes past his brother, sweeps out of the empty classroom before his eyes can brim over with tears. He hates Sirius. Or he wishes he could hate him. Hates himself for understanding that Sirius never intended to hurt him, didn’t understand the consequences of his actions, didn’t know that their parents would react like this, couldn’t have done differently even if he had known all that would follow. Regulus does understand though. He knows that Sirius had to get out or resign himself to the probability of a young grave. He knows that there wasn’t really a way that this could have possibly ended well for both of them and that Sirius was at risk of much worse than what he’s going through. With cold logical understanding, Regulus knows all of these things. Knowing these things and accepting everything that is entailed by these truths are entirely separate. 

He risks a glance back as he rounds the corner, disguising the glance in the motion of the turn to see Sirius exiting the classroom and nearly falling against the Lupin boy who evidently ignored his suggestion to meet him in their next class. His face shows every painful emotion that Regulus had inflicted on him with the sort of honesty and openness that Regulus himself has learned to mask. He sees Bella watching the scene as well and hopes that Sirius’s clear distress will be enough for her to brush off the conversation and neglect reporting it to his parents. 

He takes a deep breath as he forces his feet towards the astronomy tower. They’re doing their solar unit and it’s always strange to be up there during the light hours, but Regulus relishes in the open air feeling a little more refreshed, a little less pent up than he had mere hours ago. He knows the feeling will return in full force when he has to return home alone for the Christmas holidays, but at the moment, he feels a little more okay. 

He knows it’s selfish and petty and mean, but there’s satisfaction in forcing his brother to share the burden. He knows and quite frankly he doesn’t care. He misses Sirius and talking to him, even this cruel way of blaming and ranting is therapeutic. He wonders if they’ll talk again. Maybe nicer the next time. 

He opens his charts of solar flares and slumps against the ledge of the stone tower.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated, criticism less so :)


End file.
